The goal of the Rat Genome Database (RGD) is to provide a research platform encompassing comprehensive genetic, genomic, physiological, and phenotype datasets, and innovative software tools for data mining, presentation and analysis. RGD's user community includes those using rat to investigate genomic elements involved in biological and disease processes, clinical researchers using rat models to understand the impact of genetic and environmental variations on disease and those using informatics and computational approaches to analyze data. To support this diverse user group, we will 1) acquire and integrate genomic elements including variations and regulatory units along with mapped phenotype data, 2) enhance this catalogue with functional, disease, and phenotype annotations for genomic elements, comprehensive phenotype profiles for strains and curated molecular, drug, and disease pathways, and 3) create a research platform of innovative software tool systems to mine, display, integrate, and analyze both public and user datasets to promote discovery. Recognizing the comparative nature of much of the research conducted by our community, RGD will continue to provide comparative genomic tools including rat, human and mouse genome browsers, interactive pathway diagrams for multiple organisms and analysis tools leveraging functional data from rat, human and mouse. As part of our quality control process we will assign official nomenclature for genomic elements, QTL and rat strains. To ensure a robust platform and to provide support for the informatics community we will continue to follow industry best practices in database and software development and provide Web Services and REST API, expanded FTP site and integration of batch query tools such as Ratmine. RGD will continue to support users of multiple browsers and develop platforms for multiple devices including mobile.